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The cumulative sum (Cusum) operator, also referred to as accumulating generation operator, is the fundamental of grey system models and proves to be successful in various real-world applications. This paper aims to uncover the advantages of the Cusum operator from a parameter estimation perspective, i.e. comparing integral matching with classical gradient matching.

Grey system models are represented as a state space form to investigate the effect of measurement errors on estimation performance; subsequently, gradient matching and integral matching are respectively formulated to estimate parameters from noisy observations and, then, their quantitative relationships are established by using matrix computation tricks.

Extensive simulations, which are conducted on both linear and non-linear models under different sample size and noise level combinations, show that integral matching is superior to gradient matching, and, also the former is less sensitive to measurement error.

This paper explains why the Cusum operator is widely utilized in grey system models, thereby further solidifying the mathematical fundamentals of grey system models.

This paper aims to reduce the confliction between different retail channels.

By investigating a game-theoretic model consisting of a dominant hotel, a promoter and an OTA, the authors analyze the optimal amount of reserved rooms on the hotel's official website and realize the coordination between the hotel and the promoter with an appropriate contact.

When the gap between promoter’s reservation profits under different promotion cost coefficients is reasonable, complete coordination can be achieved in the supply chain. In addition, numerical examples are conducted to show that the profit of hotel and supply chain can be maximized with a moderate amount of reserved rooms on OTA.

The authors only focus on one OTA scenarios, which overlooks the competition between OTAs.

Coordination strategy can fierce the increase on profit when the customer conversion rate increases.

The authors propose a contract menu to help the hotel avoid the profit loss under asymmetric promotion cost information.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential economic impacts of China’s insect-resistant GM maize and provide new evidence for decision making concerning its commercialization.

This study uses data drawn from the production trials of insect-resistant GM maize and expert interviews to determine the impacts of commercializing GM maize at farm level under three scenarios with varying severity of insect pest attacks in maize production. Economic impacts are simulated using a modified Global Trade Analysis Project model.

In farm terms, insect-resistant GM maize increases crop yield and reduces both pesticide and labor inputs. In national terms, China can increase its GDP by USD8.6 billion and maize self-sufficiency by about 2 percent given normal insect pest attacks if China commercializes GM maize. Additional beneficiaries include consumers and the livestock industry. Non-maize crops can also benefit from land saving through GM maize commercialization. Chemical is a sector with the decrease in its output because demand for pesticides will fall.

Although China has announced a roadmap for commercializing GM crops for use as feed and in processing after nearly two decades of producing GM cotton, no clear timetable for producing GM maize as feed has been established due to several concerns, including the potential for economic gains from GM maize. This study is the first to assess the economic impacts of commercializing China’s GM maize. The findings should have significant policy implications for the development and commercialization of GM crops in general and GM maize in particular.

Piston ring dynamic problem plays an important role in the lubricant characteristics of a reciprocating engine, which lead to engine wear and the increased consumption of lubricating oil. A cavitation analysis of the piston ring lubrication with two-dimensional Reynolds equation has rarely been reported owing to the complex working condition. The purpose of this study is to establish a precise model that can provide guidance for the design of the piston ring.

In this paper, a cavitation model and its effect on the piston ring lubrication was studied in a simulation program based on the mass-conserving theory which is solved by means of the Newton–Raphson method. In this study, some models such as mixed lubrication, asperity contact, blow-by/blow-back flow and cavitation have been coupled with the lubrication model.

The established model has been compared with the traditional model that deals with cavitation by using the Reynolds boundary condition algorithm. The cavitation zone, pressure distribution and density distribution between the piston ring and the cylinder have also been predicted. Studies of the changing trend for the pressure distribution and the cavitation zone at few typical crank angles have been listed to illustrate the cavitation changing rule. The analysis of the results indicates that the developed simulation model can adequately illustrate the lubrication problem of the piston ring system. All the analyses will provide guidance for the oil film rupture and the reformation process.

A two-dimensional cavitation model based on the mass-conserving theory has been built. The cavitation-forming and -developing process for the piston ring–liner lubrication has been studied. Non-cavitation occurs in the vicinity of top dead center and bottom dead center. The non-cavitation period will be longer in the vicinity of 360° of crank angle. The density distribution in the cavitation zone can be obtained.

Several parameters set economic growth, and one of them is innovation. Thus, it is vital to realize the proper motives for a firm to innovate. The key actors in innovation systems – such as firms, research institutions, academia, and standards developing communities – affect knowledge ­creation, contribute to its diffusion and use, and set the global innovation capacity. Additionally, the market-driven and the worldwide open paradigm may aid to ensure stable and reliable integration, interactive abilities, and active collaborations to drive international innovation and its ­concepts forward. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international organization that assembles principles to produce such standards as mentioned above, so as to ensure a prosperous future globally. Global cooperation, openness, interaction, and the generation of motives for innovation are some of the principles that WTO embraces, and all of these are to benefit humanity from free market and trade growth, leading to triumph through innovation. Overall, this chapter examines the significant role of WTO in trade policy uncertainty and how innovation is ensured and stimulated by WTO regarding the specific case of the Chinese market.

The goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between government control and firm value in China.

Government might extract social or political benefits from a state-controlled firm, thus decreases firm value. However, government’s monitoring on firm management reduces managers’ agency problem, which increases firm value. We first build a game-theoretic model to prove the existence of optimal government control given these two roles of government, and we then employ the OLS regression method to test the theory predictions using the length of intermediate ownership chains connecting the listed state-owned enterprises to their ultimate controllers as the measure of government control.

We find that firm values first increase then decrease as government control weakens. Moreover, we find that government usually retains a stronger control over state-owned enterprises than the optimal level. In addition, we show that government control can be further weakened in firms with good corporate governance mechanisms, which serve as a substitution of government monitoring.

Our results demonstrate that government control in China is still a necessary but costly mechanism to mitigate agency costs, especially when corporate governance system is underdeveloped.

We identify the substitution effect between government control and corporate governance using a unique measure of government control.

It is a challenging task to analysis oxide wear particles when they are stuck together with other types of wear particles in complex ferrography images. Hence, this paper aims to propose a method of ferrography image segmentation to analysis oxide wear debris in complex ferrography images.

First, ferrography images are segmented with watershed transform. Then, two region merging rules are proposed to improve the initial segmentation results. Finally, the features of each particle are extracted to detect and assess the oxide wear particles.

The results show that the proposed method outperforms other methods of ferrography image segmentation, and the overlapping wear particles in complex ferrography images can be well separated. Moreover, the features of each separated wear particles can be easily extracted to analysis the oxide wear particles.

The proposed method provides a useful approach for the automatic detection and assessment of oxide wear particles in complex ferrography images.

The colours, edges and position information of wear debris are considered in the proposed method to improve the segmentation result. Moreover, the proposed method can not only detect oxide wear particles in ferrography images but also evaluate oxide wear severity in ferrography images.

The purpose of this study is to make a prediction of China's energy consumption structure from the perspective of compositional data and construct a novel grey model for forecasting compositional data.

Due to the existing grey prediction model based on compositional data cannot effectively excavate the evolution law of correlation dimension sequence of compositional data. Thus, the adaptive discrete grey prediction model with innovation term based on compositional data is proposed to forecast the integral structure of China's energy consumption. The prediction results from the new model are then compared with three existing approaches and the comparison results indicate that the proposed model generally outperforms existing methods. A further prediction of China's energy consumption structure is conducted into a future horizon from 2021 to 2035 by using the model.

China's energy structure will change significantly in the medium and long term and China's energy consumption structure can reach the long-term goal. Besides, the proposed model can better mine and predict the development trend of single time series after the transformation of compositional data.

The paper considers the dynamic change of grey action quantity, the characteristics of compositional data and the impact of new information about the system itself on the current system development trend and proposes a novel adaptive discrete grey prediction model with innovation term based on compositional data, which fills the gap in previous studies.

This case was designed for use at the undergraduate and MBA level in human resource management and international business. Upon completion of the case study discussion and assignments, students will be able to: (1) understand human resource management in multinational corporations and the importance of cross-cultural management and human resource integration in acquisitions; (2) understand the challenges and solutions faced by multinational corporations in the process of expansion; (3) analysis of what characteristics should be considered in CEO selection for managing a newly acquired company; and (4) analyze how to better promote global human resource management from the dimensions of localized HRM system reform and human resource structure reconstruction.

After a long period of negotiation, exploration, suspension and restart, Geely Group finally acquired 49.9% of the shares of DRB’s Proton Holding and 51% of the shares of the luxury car brand, Lotus Group. On the afternoon of May 24, Geely Holding Group held an acquisition signing ceremony with the Malaysia DRB-HICOM Berhad (hereinafter referred to as DRB). Geely’s commercial territory now extended into Southeast Asia, and its product spectrum increased to luxury sports cars.However, the completion of the acquisition did not mean peace of mind. On the contrary, Geely still faced a series of challenges because of differences in cultural background. The national cultures of the two countries (China and Malaysia) were very different, and so were the values of the two enterprises. Facing the challenges of promoting global human resource integration, Geely needs to make a fundamental decision on the HRM mode in the new-acquired company. Should Geely transplant its own management practice into the Proton, or adopt localized HRM philosophy? Which kind of global HRM practice would be more effective for supporting the new-acquired company developments in the future? In the post-acquisition management, how to better realize the global human resources integration become a key problem faced by Geely.

This case was designed for use at the undergraduate and MBA level in human resource management and international business.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 6: Human Resource Management.

Using computer technology to realize ferrographic intelligent fault diagnosis technology is fundamental research to inspect the operation of mechanical equipment. This study aims to effectively improve the technology of deep learning technology in the field of ferrographic image recognition.

This paper proposes a binocular image classification model to solve ferrographic image classification problems.

This paper creatively proposes a binocular model (BesNet model). The model presents a more extreme situation. On the one hand, the model is almost unable to identify cutting wear particles. On the other hand, the model can achieve 100% accuracy in identifying Chunky and Nonferrous wear particles. The BesNet model is a bionic model of the human eye, and the used training image is a specially processed parallax image. After combining the MCECNN model, it is changed to BMECNN model, and its classification accuracy has reached the highest level in the industry.

The work presented in this thesis is original, except as acknowledged in the text. The material has not been submitted, either in whole or in part, for a degree at this or any other university. The BesNet model developed in this article is a brand new system for ferrographic image recognition. The BesNet model adopts a method of imitating the eyes to view ferrography images, and its image processing method is also unique. After combining the MCECNN model, it is changed to BMECNN model, and its classification accuracy has reached the highest level in the industry.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-05-2023-0150/